“Yeah, I am. And that’s the whole problem in a nutshell,” he said. “I’m supposed to be the father, but I’m not able to. Not unless I make a huge fight over it. A goddamned war. Thing is, Margie, now it’s a war I believe I can win.”
“You’re obsessed with this, aren’t you?”
He thought about the word for a few seconds—obsessed, obsessed, obsessed—and said, “Yes. Yes, I am. I am obsessed with it. It may be the only thing I’ve wanted in my life so far that I’ve been clear about wanting. Totally absolutely clear.”
She took a sip of beer and said, “Then… I guess you have to go ahead and do it.”
He was silent. Then he said, “There’s another thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately,” and he took the bottle from her hands, finished it off in one long swallow and set it on the floor beside the bed. He slipped one arm under her head and reached around her with the other and heard himself say words as if a stranger were speaking and he had no idea what words the stranger would say next. “I don’t know how you feel about the idea, Margie, because we’ve never talked about it before. Maybe because we’ve been too scared of the idea to talk about it. But I’ve been thinking lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe we should get married sometime. You and me.”
“Oh, Wade,” she said, sounding vaguely disappointed.
‘I been just thinking about it, that’s all,” he said rapidly. “It’s not like a marriage proposal or anything, just a thought. An idea. Something for you and me to talk about and think about. You know?”
“All right,” she said. And she waited a moment and said, “I’ll think about it.”
“Good.” He kissed her on the lips, then rolled away from her and blew out the candle. When he lay back down, he could hear her low slow breathing, and after a few seconds, he tried catching her rhythm with his, as he did when they made love, and got it, so that soon they were breathing in harmony, walking along together, stride matching stride, brave and in love and crossing a grassy meadow together with blue sky overhead, drifting puffs of white clouds, soaring birds above and sunshine warming their heads and shoulders, and neither of them, ever again, alone.
13
THE SHRILL RING of the telephone tumbled Wade from light and heat — a blond dream of a beach town in summer— tossed him into darkness and cold, a bed and a room he could not at first recognize. The wrangling jangle of a telephone: he did not know where the damned thing was; it kept on ringing, still coming at him from all sides; some kind of maddened bird or rabid bat darting around his head in the darkness.
Then it stopped, and Wade heard Margie’s voice, realized he was in her bed, her house, phone, darkness, cold. He was naked, and the covers had slipped down to his waist, and his chest and shoulders and arms were chilled. He shivered his way under the covers and listened to her sleep-thickened voice.
“What? Who is this? Oh, yeah, he’s here. Wait a second,” she said, and she bumped Wade on the shoulder with the receiver. “It’s Gordon LaRiviere. He’s rip-shit about something.” She peered at the clock radio on the table beside the bed. “Christ. Four o’clock.”
Wade placed the receiver against his face, said, “Hello?” and remembered: the snow. Oh, Jesus, yes. It had been snowing all night, and here he was lying in bed, sound asleep. He had acted like any other citizen with a right to go to bed at night expecting the roads to be plowed in the morning when he woke up and made ready to drive himself and the family to church. Why had he forgotten? How had he been able to spend the night as if he did not work for LaRiviere?
It was the first time since LaRiviere got the contract to plow the town roads that this had happened to Wade; it alarmed him. What will you do next, when you have forgotten something this routine? It puzzled him; it made no sense. His life was essentially so simple and reactive that to do everything that was expected of him, Wade almost did not have to think: if it snowed, he went to LaRiviere’s garage and took either the truck or the grader and plowed the roads until they were clear; if the roads were covered with ice, he hooked the sander to the truck or grader and sanded the roads; and, of course, if it was a school day, he showed up at the school at seven-thirty and directed traffic at the crossing. After that, Monday through Friday, he spent the day doing whatever LaRiviere told him to — drill a well in Catamount, estimate a job in Littleton, clean the gear and stack pipe in the shop. Simple. A wholly reactive life.
Now, for the first time in that life, it had snowed and Wade had not reacted. A strange kind of memory lapse: he had behaved as if last night had been merely an ordinary clear cold Saturday night in November instead of a snowy one; and he had ended up in bed with Margie Fogg — because his daughter was not with him this weekend and Margie had made it clear that she wanted him to make love to her; and then he had fallen asleep — because he was sleepy. Only to find that somehow in the last eight or ten hours he seemed to have stepped out of his life and into some other person’s life, a stranger’s. And this scared him even more than LaRiviere’s predictable and justifiable wrath did. He realized that his hands were sweating. What the hell was going on with him? Maybe he really was fucked up, just like when he was in his twenties. Just like Jack. He had thought everything was going to be fine.
“Wade!” LaRiviere bellowed. “Boy, I hope to Christ you’re through getting your dick wet! You think maybe you could do a little work for me before the fucking sun comes up?”
“I… I didn’t realize…”
“No, I guess you didn’t. It’s only been snowing since suppertime. Where the fuck you been, Florida? For Christ’s sake, Wade, you know the goddamn drill. You know what to do on a goddamn night like this. You plow! You drive into town, and you take out the fucking plow, just like Jimmy did at eleven last night, and you plow, goddammit.” He paused for breath and started in again. “You plow till all the fucking roads in this town are cleared. And then I pay you for it. And then the town pays me. Very simple, Wade. I am the road agent, and I got a goddamn responsibility to the town, for which they pay me, and you got a responsibility to me, for which I pay you. That’s the drill. Got it?” He was panting. Wade pictured him red-faced and rounded in his rumpled pajamas at his kitchen table.
Wade said, “Jimmy’s already gone out?”
“Wade, it’s fucking after four A.M.! He’s been out since eleven last night.”
“I suppose he’s got the truck, and I get to go out in the grader again.”
“You think he oughta swap, maybe? Where the fuck you been the last five hours, tell me that! No, I’ll goddamn tell you where you been: while Jimmy’s been out there plowing snow, you been tucked in bed plowing Margie Fogg!”
“You’re crossing a line,” Wade said quietly.
“You already crossed, you’ve crossed just about every goddamn line you can in this town and still get by, so don’t start warning me, buddy. You got fifteen minutes. You got fifteen minutes to get your ass down here to the shop and put that fucking grader out on the road. I spent the whole last hour on the phone and the CB trying to find out where the hell you were. Ever since Jimmy called in that none of your roads were plowed yet and he ain’t seen you anywhere.”
“I’ll be there,” Wade said, and he sighed loudly.
“Fifteen minutes. You got fifteen minutes, or you’re fired, Wade. From everything. You’re supposed to be on call twenty-four hours a day. You’re the town cop, and you plow the town roads. It’s like that. I had a short talk with Mel Gordon, by the way. But we’ll settle that later, you and me. Right now, Wade, you haul your ass on down here to the shop.”